Few-Shot Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning

The rapid development of artificial intelligence and deep learning has provided many opportunities to further enhance the safety, stability, and accuracy of industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS). As indispensable components to many mission-critical CPS assets and equipment, mechanical bearings need to be monitored to identify any trace of abnormal conditions. Most of the data-driven approaches applied to bearing fault diagnosis up-to-date are trained using a large amount of fault data collected a priori. In many practical applications, however, it can be unsafe and time-consuming to collect sufficient data samples for each fault category, making it challenging to train a robust classifier. In this article, we propose a few-shot learning framework for bearing fault diagnosis based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which targets for training an effective fault classifier using limited data. In addition, it can leverage the training data and learn to identify new fault scenarios more efficiently. Case studies on the generalization to new artificial faults show that the proposed framework achieves an overall accuracy up to 25% higher than a Siamese-network-based benchmark study. Finally, the robustness and the generalization capability of the proposed framework is further validated by applying it to identify real bearing damages using data from artificial damages, which compares favorably against six state-of-the-art few-shot learning algorithms using consistent test environments.